IT has gone beyond Twitter and is official. President Barack Obama, said the White House spokesman on Friday, was “willing to have a meeting” with his Iranian counterpart if Tehran demonstrated its “seriousness” on the nuclear question. Coming in the wake of the relative improvement in the Syrian situation, a meeting between President Obama and President Hassan Rouhani on the sidelines of the General Assembly session could profoundly affect the Middle East’s geopolitical ambience and lower all sides’ confrontational postures. The meeting is not certain, because there is an ‘if’ in the American affirmative, but the fact that both sides should indicate a desire to move away from decades of hostility — even brinkmanship — brings to fruition the hopes which the outcome of the Iranian election in June had aroused. The credit for this welcome development goes to the Iranian people, because they voted for moderation and rejected the extremism that had characterised Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency for eight years. They had reasons to go for change, because the sanctions imposed by the West were hurting not the ruling elite but the people of Iran.

Will the move towards a détente succeed? There are difficulties in the way, there are hawks on both sides, and Iran has multiple centres of power. But spiritual leader Ali Khamenei’s support for the peace move could serve to strengthen President Rouhani’s domestic position. In contrast, former president Mohammad Khatami couldn’t press Iran’s ‘opening up’ because the reformist leader lacked the religious establishment’s support. This time, Ayatollah Khamenei was among those top Iranian leaders who greeted the Jewish community on Twitter on their new year. Equally important is President Rouhani’s declaration in an interview that Iran doesn’t want weapons of mass destruction, “including nuclear weapons”. This is a major shift in the Iranian position, and the US can help the Iranian leader silence his domestic critics by responding positively to the peace initiative. The West can win the Iranian people over to the cause of peace by lessening their economic hardships.